Viewers have access to an ever-increasing amount of television programming due to a growing variety of television programs and an increasing number of broadcast channels. Although the amount of television programming has increased, viewers may encounter difficulties in accessing desired television programs. For example, it may be inconvenient for a viewer to locate a desired television program due to the number of broadcast channels that are available to the viewer. Therefore, the viewer may miss the desired television program.
An electronic program guide (EPG) may be supplied to improve the viewer's experience with television programs. The EPG may enable the viewer to observe a listing of television programs that are currently being broadcast, as well as a listing of television programs that will be broadcast in the future. Additionally, the EPG may allow the viewer to navigate to a television program from the EPG itself. To provide additional information to the viewer, the EPG may include one or more television program characteristics that describe a television program in the EPG. The television program characteristics may include title, broadcast time, broadcast channel, duration, description of the television program, a rating for the television program (e.g., G, PG, PG13, R, etc.), the principle protagonist, and so on.
EPG data is used to construct an EPG. EPG data may be generated by an EPG provider from data obtained from a publisher of the television programming. The data is generally transmitted to the EPG provider from the publisher using a national guide feed. The national guide feed is provided over a high bandwidth connection from the publisher to a head end of the EPG provider, and generally includes a large amount of data. A connection is also provided between the head end and a client device such that the client device may receive EPG data generated by the EPG provider. The connection between the head end and the client device, however, may have a significantly lower bandwidth than the bandwidth of the national guide feed provided between the head end and the publisher. Additionally, because the EPG data is stored in memory of the client device, the amount of EPG data that can be stored at the client device is dependent upon the memory of the client device. If the client device is a low-resource client device, meaning the client device has limited memory, the amount of memory reserved for EPG data and the availability of that memory to provide other functionality is limited.
Therefore, there is a continuing need to improve EPG data, such as to improve compression and decompression of the EPG data to conserve memory resources and improve the interaction of client devices with compressed EPG data.